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"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
"A Vote for 'ABBH' (Any Body But Harris) is a Vote for Trump and Republo-Fascism" (S. Jonas, March, 2024)
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I am very pleased to announce in this space (with our Editor/Publisher Rob Kall's permission) the publication of the 3rd edition of my book "The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022, as projected from 1996. Purportedly published in 2048 By Jonathan Westminster." The Kindle version is on-line now. The print version will be following shortly. In this column, I am presenting a brief (well, knowing me, a relatively brief), introduction to it.I wrote this book in 1994-95 and published the first edition in 1996. In the 1990's the Republicans were telling us what they would do if they ever got significant control of the Federal and State governments. The reader can decide whether or not they have achieved at least part of their then-stated goals, and to what greater extent they would achieve them were Donald J. Trump to be re-elected in 2024.
A second edition, virtually unchanged from the first was published in 2013. In advance of the 2024 election, I am publishing this third edition, again virtually unchanged from the 1996 first edition, to reinforce the warning that I set forth in the first edition. That is because under a second Trump term many of the developments that I predicted back then, might/would/surely could, happen under Trump.
The time-line between fiction and reality is of course different. In the book I predicted that a Republican/Christian-Nationalist takeover of the nation would happen in the early 21st century, that it would eventually lead to partition of the old United States into a racially segregated "New American Republics," which would then lead to a 2nd civil war (2019-23). The Movement for the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy would win that war (yes, of course I had to have the good guys win), and then would undertake that Restoration, to (fictionally) be completed by 2023. The text of the book itself, written by "Jonathan Westminster," is purported to having been published on the 25th Anniversary of that restoration, in 2048. The name "Jonathan Westminster" is a play on the name of Jack London, who, as it happened, in 1908 published a book called "The Iron Heel." It predicted a future United States, the nature of which would in modern terms, be called "fascist."
From the perspective of 1994-95, the book indeed describes a fictional religious/authoritarian future that for the nation that was predictable back then. Under the Trumpites and their current Republican iteration, a version of it could still well become a reality. "The 15% Solution" itself refers to an electoral strategy to ensure victory for the Republican Christian Right which was actually developed in real-time in the late 1980's (see the current GOP voter suppression campaign). Written as "fictional non-fiction," the book is focused on the threat of developing fascism "American style," that was indeed posed by the Right-wing Christian fundamentalist movement operating in close alliance with the Republican Party in the mid-90's.
The book's primary purpose was, and still is, to show how a theocratic authoritarianism can be gradually introduced into any country, even the "world's greatest democracy," behind a facade of Constitutional legality no less. That is, if there is no awareness in some significant sectors of the population, and opposition elected and party officials nationally, of what might happen and is happening. In that sense, it follows the tradition established by both The Iron Heel and Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here (1936).
When originally published in 1996, the book was a warning about what might happen in the U.S. as a result of the alliance between the Christian Right and the Republican Party. With its first re-publication, virtually unchanged, in 2013, the book warned about the consequences of what was by then actually happening. By now it has become an ever more threatening reality (see The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025). Projected in the book in 1996 was that the Republican Party would transmogrify into a then-fictional "Republican-Christian Alliance." As early as 2012, the late Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post and MSNBC had determined that the Republican Party had really become what he termed the "American Faith Party." The book takes it from there.
The Origins of the Book
I began thinking about what would eventually become the book you see before you in the mid-1980's, after the re-election of Ronald Reagan. The thinking process went on for quite a while, and both the story-line and the format (novel, non-fiction, some combination of both?) underwent numerous changes. Whatever form the book would eventually take, I was concerned that during the Presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (1980's to the early 1990's), what I called the Republican Religious Right (RRR) was becoming ever more powerful. I began to think about what might happen were they to take over effectively full governmental power at the Federal and widely at the state levels.
Being an academic, to support whatever form I might come up with, I began collecting material on positions that both governmental and non-governmental representatives of the RRR were then taking about the matter of what they would indeed do, were they to gain that effective control. I gathered it from a variety of sources: published articles, books, fund-raising letters, position papers, newspaper, and magazine articles about them. Finally, in 1994, I came up with the outlines of a scenario that they might follow, and began writing this book.
I am a writer of non-fiction, not fiction. (Believe me, there are major differences in skills between the two. I regard the latter as much more difficult than the former. Non-fiction writers simply need to be able to undertake description and analysis, sometimes simply reporting. We need to use references. However, we do not need to be able to write dialogue, describe scenes and settings in appropriate prose, or engage in character development.) Thus, for this book, even though I decided that I would be writing primarily in the non-fiction style, at the same time I would of course be writing fiction, in the sense that after a certain point, I would be making up the plot-line and introducing fictional characters.
At the same time, while the story-line would be set in the then-future, it would be based on real policies and politics that real people on the Right were promoting in the 1980s and '90s. And so, I came up with what I describe as a "cross-over" book: fictional non-fiction, purportedly written by "Jonathan Westminster," a future professor of political science. The book is a supposed retrospective on the (supposed) U.S. fascist period, published in 2048 on the 25th anniversary of the re-establishment of U.S. Constitutional Democracy, July 4, 2023, following the triumph of the Movement for the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the Second Civil War (2022).
To my mind the most important feature of this book is that what was projected to happen was to the extent possible based on what the Republican Religious Right had been telling us, prior to the time I wrote the book in 1994-1996, they would do if they were ever able to gain full control of the government. Indeed, they were telling us that as far back as the 1980s, but back then nobody wanted to listen. They are telling us what they would do much more loudly now (2024).
More people are listening and more people are getting very afraid of a future governed by the (Trumpist) Republican Religious Right. Fortunately, the Democratic Party is beginning to openly respond to the threat. One of the main points that I made in the book is that the fictional transformation of the Republican Party into what I call the "Republican-Christian Alliance," then on to the "American Christian Nation Party," takes place out in the open and nobody in a position of political power and political authority says boo to a goose. Hopefully, that is beginning to change.
One nice coincidence in the book is that I named the Fascist President "J.D. Hague." His (fictional) parents, roaring racists of their time, were descendants of the notorious mid-20th century Mayor of Jersey City, N.J. Frank Hague. "Jefferson Davis" Hague was their second son. They had named their first after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the ex-Confederate general who was one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. Obviously, since I made J.D. Hague's name up in the mid-1990's, the coincidence with modern times is entirely coincidental.
The Structure of the Book
This book has three sections. Section I sets the stage. Chapter one, "Prelude to Fascism," is an essay written in 1995 by "Dino Louis," a fictional political analyst of the time. Several late 20th-century analytical and prescriptive essays or notes for essays by "Mr. Louis," concerning major sociopolitical issues of the Transition Era, are included in the book in Appendices II-VI. Chapter two, Section I, presents an overview of the book and its historical scenario in outline.
Section II, the book's longest, features for the most part selected (fictional, to-be-sure) historical documents which marked major events of the Fascist Period. Annotating, highlighting, and punctuating each of the documents are writings by four (fictional) selected observer/participants of the time (as noted, for descriptions, see just below). They provide comments/perspectives/reflections from several different points of view. The bulk of the text, however, is provided by "Westminster" in his "Author's Commentaries" and "Author's Notes."
Section III presents a retrospective chapter (20) by "Westminster" considering "What Could Have Been Done" (in the 1990's) to prevent the national nightmare from ever occurring.
In Conclusion, as "Jonathan Westminster" himself puts it (in the year 2048)
"Many books have been written about the Fascist Period. In fact, it has been estimated that if not for the chronic paper shortage, in the 25 years since the Restoration more books would have been written about both the Period and the Second Civil War than had been written about slavery and the First Civil War in the 100 years following the latter's conclusion. Many of these books have been devoted to detailed historical descriptions of the events, monumental and not so monumental, that took place during the time. Some of the more important ones are cited in the reference lists for this book.
"However, as noted, this book has a rather different perspective from that of a conventional history book. I want people living now to know, not in detail about the depredations wreaked on our economy, polity, and society by the Fascists (although those are covered in outline), not about the defeats the Constitutionalist forces endured at first and the detailed story of their eventual victory, not about the widespread environmental degradation at all levels that took place and from which we are still struggling to recover, but rather about how easily the forces of the Republican Religious Right took over, how step by step they created Fascism by apparently legal means, how precious and at the time unappreciated our Constitutional Democracy was, and what must be done, even now, to defend it and eventually transcend it toward a far more real form of egalitarian power."
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